The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario is to decide whether ethical veganism is a creed, as protected by anti-discrimination laws, in the case of a Ryerson University master’s student in social work who claims senior faculty “sabotaged” her career because of her moral equivalence of animals and humans.

Sinem Ketenci, 37, who immigrated from Turkey as a young woman and studied at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay before doing a master’s at Ryerson, alleges a senior professor disagreed with her comparison of maltreated animals with marginalized people, said the connection was “very inhuman and racist,” and pressured Ms. Ketenci’s untenured supervisor into withdrawing his recommendation of her PhD candidacy at other schools, which she called an academic “kiss of death.”

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In an interview Monday, Ms. Ketenci said the fallout has extended to her personal life, costing her friends among fellow students, and left her “traumatized.”

“This systemic discrimination and harassment that silences marginalized minority peoples’ voices, such as me as a Racialized Ethical Vegan, is a serious threat towards freedom of speech and freedom of belief,” Ms. Ketenci writes in her complaint to the tribunal.

“I entered the [master’s] program with good intentions, and instead, I was attacked and treated unfairly because of my belief in ethical veganism and because I am a member of a marginalized community, vegan animal rights activists.”

Ryerson declined to comment Monday and has not filed a written response. The complaint has only just been laid. If it is accepted, mediation will precede a hearing.

Correspondence from the school to Ms. Ketenci indicates it views the dispute as an academic matter, exempt from discrimination law.

“There is no positive obligation on the school to expand course work to allow for the inclusion of all creed or faith based discussions,” reads an email from Ryerson’s discrimination and harassment prevention officer.

“If you would like to proceed with a [research project] at this time, you must select a topic that is clearly related to social work practice and/or policy. Your topic must not be related in any way — directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly — to animal rights,” reads an email from the interim director of Ryerson’s School of Social Work.

At issue for the tribunal is whether veganism is a “creed,” a broader term than “religion” or “faith” that captures a range of beliefs and spiritualities, but not so broad it includes every political leaning and moral inclination.

Ms. Ketenci’s complaint, footnoted like an academic paper, argues ethical veganism involves a moral imperative and various devotional practices, like a religion. It is legally a “creed,” she says, and therefore discrimination against it violates the code. She is asking for $15,000 compensation.

“I believe that the faculty’s reaction has its basis in the strict religious belief of ‘men’s domination over animals’ that racialized people’s suffering should not be spoken about in the same context of animal suffering and that sympathy for animal suffering is not as important as sympathy for racialized peoples’ suffering,” her complaint reads. “It is as if one must choose and cannot believe in both.”

The woman says she has been a vegan for three years, and a vegetarian for seven before that, so her commitment is a decade long and serious, but she admits to a certain ethical looseness.

Asked whether her sneakers have leather detailing, for example, she shrugs it off with a maybe, as if it is the exception that proves the rule.

“Animals shouldn’t be treated like animals either,” she quips. “Increasing animals’ value, I am not decreasing the value of humans.”

She has five cats, all rescues: Gorgeous, Kyle, Bear, Calak and Cinaly.

Ms. Ketenci implies racism motivated the decision to reject her research project on animal rights in social work, but does not explicitly allege it.

“If I were white, born here, this case would not have happened,” she said.

In response to criticism equating humans with animals is a common racist trope, she said that she, as a racialized woman, cannot be racist.

“How am I being racist if ‘race’ is a part of my identity?”

When her qualitative research project about animal rights activism in social work was denied this year, leading ultimately to this complaint, Ms. Ketenci’s response was to suggest a new one about the “marginalization and systemic discrimination of animal rights activists.”

The subject may be on the fringes of social work, a field known for indulging its fringes, but there is at least some literature on it.

Cassandra Hanrahan, assistant professor at Dalhousie University’s School of Social Work in Halifax, published a paper in August describing her encounters with “speciesism, a specific form of discrimination based on species not recognized within social work’s anti-oppressive practice paradigm.”

Through “epiphanies” she felt while walking her dogs — Aureole, a 15-year-old border collie, and Ramon, a beagle — Prof. Hanrahan describes herself as a “witness to animals as marginalized groups whose exploitation is symbolically and empirically linked to the exploitation of marginalized and disenfranchised groups of humans.”